Bulbs You Can Plant and Ignore

I expect a lot from plants in my garden. I will baby them at planting time, but then they must grow with a minimum of care.

Bulbs get planted at the proper depth, in a thoroughly prepared bed, but they had better not expect me to dig them up each summer when they go dormant or require any other kind of coddling.

Once they’re in the ground, I expect them to grow and multiply on their own, returning reliably each fall and blooming on schedule in spring.

Tough love? Not really, because there are plenty of bulbs that can do this. But my rules pretty much eliminate two of the most common bulbs, tulips and daffodils. They, and a few others, are best treated like bedding plants, tossed out at the end of the season and replanted each autumn.

The plethora of bulbs at nurseries can be divided, very roughly, into those that behave as bedding plants do and those that will persist in the garden. The lists presented here can be used as shopping guides to tell one type from the other.

Tulips seldom return the second year in our mild climate, and it’s a good idea to dig them up after they flower, while you can still find the bulbs. Otherwise, they will send up leaves the next year, but no flowers, and as likely as not those leaves will be right in the middle of an otherwise tidy planting of pansies.

If you’re up to the work, tulips are spectacular massed in a garden bed, but you need to dig deep holes when planting in the fall, then again when you uproot them in spring. Fanciers I know excavate entire beds to a depth of 8 inches, so the bulbs end up covered with 6 inches of soil. This guarantees tall and sturdy stems.

They also set them on an inch-thick bed of sand at the bottom of this pit, to keep the bulbs from rotting. And, of course, they must first store the tulips in their refrigerator for about six weeks to provide the chilling they need. Heaven knows where they find the room.

An option after chilling: Plant them in pots, packed closely together just beneath the surface, and grow them on the patio.

Most daffodils, especially the King Alfred types, will not persist, but they are easier to plant, requiring no chilling and shallower holes (roughly twice as deep as the bulb is tall). Few kinds will return the next year, unless you live in one of the colder areas of Southern California, say up near Big Bear, where they will naturalize, or even in chilly Topanga Canyon, where they are one of the few things gophers won’t eat.

There are a few persistent daffodils for the more typical garden. “Geranium,” “Ice Follies,” “Trevithian,” paper whites and a few others come back year after year. In general their flowers are smaller and less spectacular, and that is the case with most of the bulbs that require little care.

These no-care bulbs will never make the show that tulips or large-flowered daffodils are capable of, so they are best planted as little clumps here and there in the garden: beside paths, at the edge of a patio or popping out of ground cover or plantings of perennials.

There are even a couple of small, nearly wild tulips that will do this. The lady tulip, also called candy tulip because of its peppermint-stick coloring, is one. Tulipa clusiana, native to Iran and Iraq, have survived in my garden for years and return like clockwork to flower in spring. They do equally well packed into pots.

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With slender 2-inch-tall blooms on foot-tall stems, they’re very pretty though not spectacular but, then, what can you expect from a flower that requires no work?

Many bulbs from the cape region of South Africa thrive with little care, and you need only dig a hole an inch or two deep to plant the little bulbs or corms.

Freesias are the best known, but only the double-flowered forms and creamy whites come back year after year in my garden. They do best when the flowers are supported between other low plants.

A friend has a neat trick; he plants his bedding plants then sticks the freesia corms in between, planting them 3 inches deep with a big dibble (a pointed planting stick). He usually digs them out with the change of bedding plants.

Other common cape bulbs are much more reliable, including babianas, homerias, ixia, sparaxis, tritonias and watsonias. All grow with virtually no care. They’ll even grow with no watering, except in rainless years.

The wildly colored sparaxis are the most persistent. I’ve run a rototiller over them and had them pop back the next fall. Ixias are a little less rugged but still reliable and, though their flowers are small, they come on tall wand-like stems that wave in the wind, hence the common name of wand flower. Tritonias resemble freesias in size and habit.

Homerias are completely reliable in garden beds and a little taller and bolder than most. They also bloom for more than a month. There’s a soft orange and a sultry yellow. Taller still and just as reliable are the gladiolus-like watsonias. These make quite a show in spring.

Many other cape bulbs will thrive here, but they are hard to find at nurseries because they grow in few other climates, so nurseries don’t bother growing them. Almost all are small and dainty and quite suited to the drier garden.

If this piques your interest, get Richard Doutt’s book “Cape Bulbs” (Timber Press, $34.95, [800] 327-5680). He describes many that can be grown here and their culture, and he lists a few obscure sources.

Ranunculus, originally from ancient Persia, can come back year after year, but it often doesn’t. The tubers are so inexpensive that they are best planted en masse as annual bedding plants, and they need little other care.

There is a trick, however, to sprouting them without rotting the tubers: Water thoroughly after planting and then refrain from watering again until the first leaves push through the soil. It sounds easy, but this takes real control on the part of the impatient gardener who believes that more water is the cure for everything.

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Best grown as bedding plants, replanted each fall:

anemones

chionodoxas

Dutch crocuses

hyacinths

large florist cyclamens

large-flowered daffodils

lilies

ranunculuses

tulips

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Most likely to return each year on their own:

acidantheras

alliums

amaryllises

babianas

brodiaea

callas

crinadonnas

fall-blooming crocuses

saffron crocuses

small-flowered daffodils

freesias

galtonias

homerias

Dutch irises

ixias

leucojums

lycoris

montbretias

muscaris

nerines

ornithogalums

oxalises

scillas

sparaxis

tritelias

tritonias

watsonias